Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are both in trouble for 2024
Much is being made of a new poll released yesterday which has Ron DeSantis roughly twenty points ahead of Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2024 Republican presidential primary matchup. This is yet another example of the danger (and inherent dishonesty) of hyping a single poll out of context. All you have to do is look at FiveThirtyEight to see that for every poll showing DeSantis well ahead of Trump, there’s another competing poll showing Trump well ahead of DeSantis. If you look at the averages, Trump and DeSantis are roughly tied – and that’s actually bad news for both of them.
If you were talking about two broadly popular, scandal-free candidates, and they were tied in a hypothetical matchup for an election that’s still two years away, you’d say they were both in the thick of it. But that’s not the case with Trump and DeSantis.
Trump has massive name recognition heading into 2024. He’s the de facto Republican incumbent. He still has his hooks so deep into the Republican Party that the upcoming race for RNC Chair is essentially a contest to see which candidate can kiss Trump’s backside the most thoroughly. The notion that he’d merely be tied with an up and comer like DeSantis is just devastating for Trump.
On the other hand, Trump has so much political baggage he’s redefined the term, and he’s likely to be in prison for espionage well before the 2024 election. So how is it possible that someone like DeSantis, who’s been breathlessly hyped by the media for the past two years, is merely tied with him?
These two candidates just ooze vulnerability. There’s a metric ton of easy opposition research on them both. If either one of them were in any way capable of connecting with 2024 voters, one would be well ahead of the other. But in a race where one of them is headed for prison, and the other has the personality and political IQ of cardboard, they’re both in trouble. They’re both highly susceptible to some new Republican face, without the baggage and endless self inflicted scandals, stepping into the race and passing them both by.
